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Thanatos

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Thanatos

the death instinct in FREUD's theory of personality. Thanatos involves all instincts which are destructive, such as aggression. It is the opposite of EROS, the life instinct.
Collins Dictionary of Sociology, 3rd ed. © HarperCollins Publishers 2000

Thanatos

(Mors) god of death; brother of Somnos (sleep). [Gk. Myth.: Gayley, 54]
See: Death
Allusions—Cultural, Literary, Biblical, and Historical: A Thematic Dictionary. Copyright 2008 The Gale Group, Inc. All rights reserved.
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References in periodicals archive
This shows the agony of mind of young child, whose instinct of Thanatos spurred and waiting for his own death desperately.
Think of Beauty Queen: Eros and Thanatos then as the artist's own De Kooning Woman.
Thanatos here has been linked with eros, the pleasure principle in Freud, as the book Introducing Freud: a Graphic Guide to the father of Psychoanalysis highlights:
She embarks on a quest to find Thanatos, the death god who is the only one who can save John.
In the case of Polish Cavalry, some professional readers may, for example, conclude that a reading in terms of Freud's views on Eros and Thanatos is inescapable.
This duality of Eros and Thanatos is presented here as 'the eternal conflict at the centre of human civilisation'.
The rapid dissemination of the image replicated a number of frames of interpretation that audiences engaged across and within mediated sites including frames of naturalism, the dualism of eros (love or life instinct) and thanatos (death instinct), and the transient trends of popular culture.
It derived from the classical Greek notion of the world as strung between the struggle for supremacy between Eros (Life) and Thanatos (Death).
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